Eat a Super Health Breakfast

The first – and easiest – step you should take towards becoming more healthy is so, so simple; it’s eating breakfast. Breakfast eaters get myriad benefits including:

• a revved up metabolism started early so that it burns the maximum number of calories to fuel your activities
• fewer total calories consumed throughout the day
• an increased leptin output

What’s leptin, you ask? Leptin is a hormone that suppresses appetite. Eating a significant meal early in the day ensures our body’s leptin production, says Meg Jordan, Ph.D., R.N. – as reported to First, September 2003. The book "Fit Not Fat at 40-Plus: The Shape-Up Plan That Balances Your Hormones, Boosts Your Metabolism, and Fights Female Fat in Your Forties-And Beyond", published by Prevention Health Books for Women, has more of Dr. Jordan’s thoughts on leptin’s influence on appetite.

Since leptin suppresses appetite, it follows that those of us who eat breakfast would take in fewer calories throughout the day. In fact, researchers at the University of Texas, El Paso, studied the food diaries of 586 men and women and determined that the more food people ate in the morning, the fewer calories they consumed in an entire day. So eat up early – though what we eat for breakfast may affect what we eat later on.

That’s right. Your first step to losing weight – eating breakfast – is not as simple as just popping any convenience food into your mouth. Eating refined carbohydrates such as sugary cereals, toasted white bread, waffles, or bagels will likely begin an overeating cycle. Instead, opt for complex carbs, proteins and fats. Whole wheat toast with peanut butter and a banana, or a bowl of high-fiber cereal with low-fat milk and blueberries are good examples. Both options are quick to get you out the door and on your way to starting your day.

Feeding yourself a healthy breakfast of complex carbs, proteins and fats should prevent your feeding the vending machine any money before lunch, making you thinner and your change purse fatter

You challenge for this week is to eat a super healthy breakfast. You should avoid:

1. Highly processed foods (commercial breakfast cereal, pop tarts, protein bars and powders, refined flour bagels, waffles and toast, sugary processed fruit juices)

You should include whole foods like:

1. Eggs

2. Vegetables of all types

3. Fresh fruit (home made smoothies)

4. Whole grains- traditional or steel cut oatmeal, cooked wheat or brown rice, home made whole grain pancakes, waffles or bread (if you use syrup use 100 real maple syrup not sugary processed syrups)

5. Yogurt or cottage cheese